In No Condition to Drive

How I learned to love fashion..

Over the last few years I have developed a fondness and appreciation for men's and women's fashion and fashion design. After spending years walking down the street and passing by the clothing places on 24th St. I began to enjoy the various window displays and arrangements. I took more time to notice the cuts, the shapes, the forms, the patterns. My favorite place is Ambiance. The window displays are almost always beautifully integrated arrangements of color, pattern, and form. This photograph was taken from a dress in one of their displays. I rather enjoy the scalloped shapes and the amazing contrast of the warms and cools. I took this into Photoshop and messed around with the color and saturation levels a bit. I always look forward to their new displays. Oh, yeah the Phoenix bookstore also has fun arrangements of books based on color schemes. This is always fun from a color and text perspective.

My only lament is that there are very few clothing places for men in this neighborhood. I do enjoy dressing up myself, especially for work or work related things. I still love my Carharts, black t-shirt, and baseball cap, but I have developed a fondness for nice button down shirts, ties, pants, and shoes. I was already headed this direction, and then after watching Don Draper and Co. on Mad Men for the last year or so, I really developed a stronger appreciation for dressing up. When I dress up I feel accomplished.
On the flip side of dressing up, I have also taken an interest in finding t-shirt designs. I found a couple that I really liked at the recent Threads fashion event in SF, and ordered another from BrassTack Apparel.

Now, after years and years of drawing the nude figure, I find myself interested in spending more time drawing clothed figures and clothing. I like looking through fashion magazines for interesting figures, portraits, styles, and trying to draw them, but would prefer to work from life. I am looking for any interested models, who may have some interesting outfits, or arrangements.

Praxis

Using the name of the anarchist collective I've lived with, in, around for almost fifteen years, I did this exercise in which I first hand drew the Old English letter forms by hand, then built the vector version of the letters in Illustrator, added flourishes with brush strokes and brush styles. Then I rasterized the whole mess and exported to a Photoshop doc and used drop shadow, outer glow, and emboss for final touches. I know layer styles are somewhat scorned by professional graphic designers for their overuse, but what the hey, I don't know about you but I'm always pretty happy when things are glowing and all soft around the edges.

BAL TV in lights

Another fun tutorial I followed, using the name of our school's in house television broadcast show. It's all about light brushes. This was one of those effects I would always see and be like "How you do that?"

CAST Motion Graphics

Here's a piece I made last year. Using the name of the academy I help run and teach in at my high school, I animated an Illustrator/Photoshop tutorial project in After Effects. I really enjoyed producing work that combined several different programs. This was one of those moments where I felt like my skill set and intuitive sense of working with computer graphics and motion graphics crossed into a new dimension. I still have a lot to learn, but this is a good example of how far I've come.

Fractured City

This piece from a couple of years ago was one of my efforts to explore abstraction in Photoshop. I was a little slow to developing an appreciation for abstraction and minimalism in art and design, and am now trying to play catch up. I like the feel of this piece and the directions it points towards. Maybe a bit too much recognizable source imagery.

Old Habits Die Hard (Photoshop Remix)

Originally conceived as a tattoo style watercolor, this piece has been done in oil as well. Here the original watercolor has been edited in Photoshop, to hopefully become animated in After Effects and or Flash in the near future. Liked the direction this was going, but could use some more work and attention to detail.